Secret Family Recipe Book

Does your grandma have the world's best banana bread recipe? Do fights break out at Thanksgiving over the last slice of your apple pie? Does your dad or husband have the best barbecue sauce ever invented? Is the family dog trying to sell your "baked beans" recipe?

For this swap you will create a recipe "book". The book must have a sturdy cover on the front and back decorated in any way you choose. Be creative and put forth your best effort! Use your imagination! For instance, you could use a cereal box as your "sturdy" material and decorate it with paints, stamps, fabric--whatever you choose. Anything goes! Use whatever medium you desire. Make your personality shine in your craft!

Inside you will hand write (or hand print) on pretty paper a minimum of 10 of your favorite recipes that you or someone in your family has actually made but feel free to include more than 10! These don't necessarily have to be your original recipes since we all "tweak" the recipes we use.

What I do NOT want is for someone to print off a bunch of crappy random recipes from the internet and paste them into a spiral notebook and put a bunch of kiddy stickers as embellishents.

If your have your great great grandmother's original handwritten recipe card from seventy years ago, you can make a nice photocopy of it on your scanner and use it the way she wrote it...in fact, I encourage you to do this! Old recipe cards are so neat! Just be sure it is legible. Include your email address in case the recipient needs to clarify an ingredient or measurement.

If you have a favorite recipe from a particular cookbook you use, go ahead and use it, just give credit to the book it is from. But only do this if it is a recipe you use frequently (holidays and special occasions count if you usually make the recipe during these times).

This will be a time consuming swap. I am not going to stipulate what should get a heart...I feel the recipient should decide that on their own. If the quality is there and it shows a lot of thought, effort and "heart" have gone in to the project, then I am certain the gratitude will be expressed in the rating you receive.

I encourage you to include a short bio on the family members whose recipes you include. Or maybe a short narrative about a memory related to the particular recipe...you can include a picture of the person or whatever. The goal here is to make this as personal as possible...think of it as a "time capsule" showcasing your family. While this is not "required" it does make the book more interesting and personalized.

I'd like for these to be postmarked by October 31st so they are received before Thanksgiving. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Fine print:

Because of the time consuming nature of this project I will not accept anyone who has flaked in the past year-NO EXCEPTIONS. I cannot guarantee that I can angel this swap so if you are not certain you can fulfill it, please do not join.

If you join and later find you cannot fulfill I ask that you contact me and your partner ASAP and try to find an angel for it BEFORE the deadline and preferrably far enough in advance that the angel would have time to create a quality swap. I have had to find angels before for swaps I couldn't fulfill so I know that life can get in the way. I will help you in any way I can but PLEASE only if it is life and death...

If you are responsible and initiate this ahead of time, you'll find, as I did, that there are many wonderful people on Swap-bot who will angel and the recipients, in my experience, will give you a good rating because you took the initiative. You can read my profile if you wish to know more about my experience with finding angels.